TMNT: Cradle
by princessebee
Summary: Raphael catches her. 2K14 'verse. Raphril.


_Inspired by that footage we've all watched over and over, Raphael catching April midair as she plummets to her death. Will be made redundant by the film, but I had feelings and needed to write them. Written quickly and late at night after a very big day on only five hours sleep._

**ooo**

She'd always been so strong.

Against all the odds – the dismissive sneers and the lecherous leers, the flippant disregard and the disbelieving eyerolls – she had battled on and through, relentless and fixated on her goal. She wouldn't let it wear her down, not any of it, no matter how the scoffing and snickering threatened to chip away at her armour. She would never be cowed. She would never be beaten. She would never show weakness.

Now, as she plummeted through the air, her arms flailing uselessly at empty space and the merciless sidewalk rising inexorably towards her, April O'Neil had no strength left.

She opened her mouth to scream, but cold air rushed in, seizing her lungs.

Her battle to greatness had brought her to this and the odds had beaten her.

Then above her, ripping through the indifferent blue of the sky, he came hurtling. Not collapsing into space as she was, but tearing through it, seeming to split the air around him with the force of his intent.

She reached out for him against the pull of gravity that so determinedly dragged her down, a last reflexive effort at survival even as the certainty of her death liquefied her guts.

Then he had her.

His enormous green hand closed tight around her wrist, the calloused skin of his palm seeming to root her to him. Her shoulder jerked with the force of her abrupt and unexpected defiance against the laws of physics, and the pain seemed to herald that life was claiming her again, wholehearted and raw.

April could not tear her eyes from his face, not for a second, as though the very sight of it kept her anchored to him and far, far away from the unyielding pavement. His huge teeth had been bared and clenched as he reached for her, his lips curling back in a snarl of triumph and strain when he'd caught her and his brow furrowed, his amber eyes steely and focused as he hauled her up towards him with just that one powerful arm, his other securely gripping the steel bars of the toppled tower.

April was barely aware of how her flattened lungs struggled still to inhale as her wind-chilled and shaking hands grasped desperately at the ridge of his plastron, clutched upwards to cling to his shoulders as he lifted a granite thigh to prop her on before letting go of her wrist to encircle his arm securely around her waist, the massive bicep a cushioning support against the small of her back, his huge hand then scooping the crook of her knee and keeping her firmly upheld so that she did not feel even the slightest quiver of instability.

And, one-armed, he swung them inbetween the bars, finding a triangle of metal he could brace them against as even still the far-distant ground below them swayed unnervingly.

In one great gasp, April inhaled and her body came to life with pins and needles, her jellied guts pooling straight into her knees.

She turned her face from the brutal ground she'd come so close to knowing more intimately than any lover, and clung to Raphael as a violent quaking overcame her whole body. She prayed silently she wouldn't puke all over his shell.

Raphael held her cradled still close against him, her body wedged easily into the crook of his huge arm, the muscle there steady and unflinching.

"I gotcha," he soothed quietly into her ear, his deep, rasping voice gentle. "April, it's okay. I gotcha."

In a moment she would pull it together again. In a moment she would calm and steady herself, be the fighter once more, undeterred by any threat that stood in her way.

But just for right then, as she pressed her face into the leathery skin of his neck and drew in the comforting scent of his sweat, feeling her heartbeat soothed back to normal by the steady thrum of his own and his powerful shoulders beneath her grasping palms a stabilising plane that held firm and unshakeable, April knew that, for once, she didn't have to be strong.


End file.
